Lessons Learned From The Latest Data Breaches

The recent highly publicized data breaches at prominent retailers, smack in the midst of the holiday shopping season, teaches the lesson that building a cyber moat around the enterprise is not enough. The data itself needs to be secured, adding a potent layer of security that will defeat most attempts to monetize stolen data.

Sophisticated and organized identity thieves can get behind even the most diligent retailer’s firewall. It happens to our most secure government agencies. So it’s no surprise it happens to merchants following PCI guidelines. It’s time to up the game, and secure the data itself.

PCI has embraced the concept of “Point to Point Encryption” and “tokenization” to lock down the data itself. It’s a simple concept — encrypt data before any software can read it, and don’t store it in the merchant’s system.